Organizational Improvement and Quality Policy Deployment

The objective for this module is to discuss management strategies needed
to assure the success of the organization by viewing the organization as
a system and understanding quality policy deployment.

Here are three cases to ponder:

There are many managers who do a great job in their own area of responsibility,
who may even make a profit, but unbeknownst to them, have contributed to
the demise of their company.

A consulting firm is hired to create a strategic plan for the organization.
One year later, the plan has not produced the desired results and the consulting
firm blames the organization for not implementing the plan as written.

The Director of Quality is asked to provide the organization with a "quality
plan" that is separate from the strategic plan for the organization.
A plan is submitted, but not much happens. The leaders decide that
this person and this quality stuff is not very useful and decide to eliminate
the position.

All these situations could have been prevented had the leaders thought
of their organization as a system. In the Quality
Library for Module 5, you will find a tutorial that has been used by
many senior leaders to create their improvement plan. Review these
materials and think about an organization for which you once worked or
are working for now. Your final assignment should use these materials
as the overarching framework.

There are a myriad of books and seminars devoted to leaders' role in
quality improvement, and yet we are not seeing many success stories.
I would encourage you to review the companies that have received the Baldrige
Award as well as the criteria for winning this award. This information
can be found on the Internet. (The best site I found was The
National Quality Award). Again, in your final assignment,
bring in the components of the Baldrige Award criteria.

Quality Policy Deployment

Once an organization has decided on its business strategies, then its priorities
for improvement, communication of the vision, mission, and marching orders
need to be orchestrated in such a way that everyone in the organization
knows how he or she fits in the big picture and what his or her role is.
This has traditionally been done poorly in most organizations. Employees
do not have a clear sense of what is happening, and so constantly feel
like management is getting ready to "pull a fast one" on them. Morale
suffers terribly in these situations.

Please read in the Quality Library and the following articles in your course reader:

Benchmarking

There are many organizations that believe that benchmarking is essential
for the organization to succeed. I have an opinion about benchmarking
that I will put forth for you to consider. Benchmarking works if
companies already know their processes before they go looking for
benchmarking partners. They have flowcharts AND data, know exactly how
their data were collected as well as the data from the benchmarking partner.
If they only compare results, that is an invitation for mischief.
Remember the process, the people issues, the environment, etc. that contribute
to the outcomes. However, benchmarking should let you see where the
"best of the best" are and why you had better improve if your competition
is ahead of you. The following articles are meant to stimulate your
thinking, but I suggest you explore other authorities on the subject.

Final Assignment:

In order for you to demonstrate your understanding of the materials in
this course, please write a critical analysis of the case presented in
Stayer's article "How I let my workers lead".

A critical analysis is not a book report. Do not
summarize the article: I've already read it! Rather, a critical analysis
means you should have lots of sentences that start with: "I think...,"
"I disagree with...," "He should have done...," "Stayer instituted fear
according to McBean...," etc.This analysis should contain materials, with
appropriate citations, (Joiner states that.....) from all the modules
and articles of this course.

You have two choices for the framework for your paper, "The Organization
as a System" in the Quality Library, or the "Baldridge Criteria" (Web site
on National Quality Award above). For Organization as a System, tollow
the ten steps in this model to analyze the article. For example,
when you look at the output of Johnsonville Sausage, you should
look for what they produced--not only sausage, but other products as well.
When you look at production, you should think about the process,
based on your work in Module 2. Module 4 talked aboaut how people fit in
the picture so tell me about the employees of the Sausage company so this
would fit in customers and customer knowledge. If you
use the Baldridge Award criteria, just review the seven categories (Leadership,
Strategic Planning, Customer and market focus, etc.) and analyze the article
from these categories.

This paper should be about 12-15 pages (double-spaced) and should be
an indication of your understanding of quality improvement. If other
assignments were less than stellar, but this one is first rate, I will
skew your grade in favor of this paper.

One last favor. I am very interested in improving this
course therefore, would you comment on the content, instructor support,
and anything else you feel should or could be improved.